Overview

Summary

  • Does the language you operate in determine which social norm you apply to a situation?
  • We run a Prolific experiment with bilingual Americans of Latino heritage, randomizing the language of the survey itself. We run a similar survey on a sample of average Americans.
  • We find that participants taking the survey in English exhibit normative behavior closer to an average American than those in the Spanish treatment.

Next Steps and Concerns

  • Key problem: differential attrition.
  • Elicit WTA for translating something into Spanish
  • Show that the results are not driven by different levels of understanding the text.
  • Is there something in the language per se? Does doing it in a different language produce the same result?
  • We know that people who are speaking non-native language behave more rationally? We need to have that as a robustness check (although our results go against that - assuming that our sample is English first - and it seems so).
  • A natural question is whether non-Latinos who learn Spanish exhibit similar traits or not (the hope is that they don’t). Think about recruiting a small subsample of non-Latino Spanish speakers.
  • The surprising fact is that they deviate away from the Mexican norm
    • First, we need to check the “origin” country and its norm;
    • But more interestingly, this is probably driven by immigrants being more tightly knit. When you think in Spanish you don’t remember anything about Mexico, you remember abuela’s cooking and the environment around it.

Descriptive Analysis

Attrition

## # A tibble: 3 × 5
##   Group    Sample AttritionAtConsent   Age  Male
##   <chr>     <int>              <int> <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 American     66                 34  34.9 0.485
## 2 English     105                  9  32.7 0.553
## 3 Spanish     100                 17  32.7 0.444

Balance

English (N=105) / Mean English (N=105) / Std. Dev. Spanish (N=100) / Mean Spanish (N=100) / Std. Dev. Diff. in Means p
GenerationImmigrant 1.903 0.552 1.897 0.445 -0.006 0.932
ProlificApprovals 6.862 1.293 6.775 1.319 -0.087 0.634
Age 32.124 8.014 32.740 10.123 0.616 0.631
Male 0.590 0.494 0.510 0.502 -0.080 0.249
Student 0.241 0.430 0.247 0.434 0.006 0.929
USBorn 0.800 0.402 0.910 0.288 0.110 0.025
CheckMean 0.902 0.168 0.897 0.155 -0.005 0.827
CheckPerfect 0.667 0.474 0.600 0.492 -0.067 0.325
EnglishProficiency 9.683 0.709 9.817 0.650 0.134 0.159
SpanishProficiency 8.048 1.914 8.087 1.867 0.039 0.883

Checks

CombinedIndex

Dictator

Monitored Dictator

Trust Game

Analysis

Standardized Indices

Prosociality Index

Incentivized measures: donation in the Dictator Game, giving and returning in the Trust Game (standardized).

ProsocialityIndex
(Intercept) -0.077
0.069
p = 0.263
GroupSpanish 0.158
0.098
p = 0.109
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID

Kinship Index

Unincentivized survey measures of Collectivism, Kinship, Family, and Social Desirability (standardized).

KinshipIndex
(Intercept) -0.058*
0.033
p = 0.082
GroupSpanish 0.120**
0.048
p = 0.013
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID

Prostate Index

Prostate index combines Honesty and Dictator Punishment (respecting objective rules).

ProstateIndex
(Intercept) 0.032
0.076
p = 0.670
GroupSpanish -0.066
0.109
p = 0.542
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID

PCA

Regressions

PCA1  PCA2  PCA2  PCA3
(Intercept) −0.305 −0.787*** 1.229*** 0.375*
0.278 0.221 0.271 0.225
p = 0.272 p = <0.001 p = <0.001 p = 0.096
Group = American 0.498 2.016*** −0.859**
0.440 0.350 0.356
p = 0.259 p = <0.001 p = 0.017
Group = English 0.475 0.765** −1.252*** −0.428
0.388 0.308 0.346 0.314
p = 0.222 p = 0.014 p = <0.001 p = 0.173
Group = Spanish −2.016***
0.350
p = <0.001
Num.Obs. 271 271 271 271
Std.Errors IID IID IID IID

Scree Plot

Correlation Plot

Cosine Plot

2D Plot

Absolute Distance Index

 DistanceIndex
(Intercept) 0.822***
0.018
p = <0.001
Group = American −0.073**
0.029
p = 0.011
Group = Spanish 0.029
0.026
p = 0.254
Num.Obs. 271
Std.Errors IID

Mahalanobis Distance

[under construction]

Individual Outcomes

Incentivized Games

Dictator

ResultsDictator
(Intercept) 1.690***
0.097
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish 0.290**
0.139
p = 0.039
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID

Monitored Dictator

Donation

ResultsMonitoredA
(Intercept) 1.948***
0.091
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish 0.087
0.130
p = 0.503
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID
Punishment

How much would you punish the dictator if you are the observer, given his decision?

CumResultsPunishment
(Intercept) 6.760***
0.496
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish 0.199
0.710
p = 0.780
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID

Trust Game

Sending

ResultsTrustA
(Intercept) 3.038***
0.126
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish 0.062
0.181
p = 0.733
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID
Returning

CumResultsTrustReturn
(Intercept) 26.086***
1.147
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish 1.639
1.643
p = 0.320
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID

Honesty

ResultsHonesty
(Intercept) -1.390***
0.283
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish -0.500
0.405
p = 0.218
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID

Survey Outcomes

Kinship

CumSurveyKinship
(Intercept) 23.829***
0.368
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish 1.301**
0.527
p = 0.014
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID

Family

Family Importance

SurveyFamilyImportance
(Intercept) 4.295***
0.090
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish 0.285**
0.129
p = 0.029
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID
Family Duty of Care

CumSurveyFamilyDuty
(Intercept) 16.705***
0.348
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish -0.205
0.499
p = 0.682
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID

Collectivism

CumSurveyCollectivism
(Intercept) 17.857***
0.311
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish 0.623
0.446
p = 0.164
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID

Patience

TBD

Social Desirability

CumSurveySocialDesirability
(Intercept) 3.895***
0.286
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish 0.695*
0.410
p = 0.092
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID

Socialization

Time with Latinos

SurveyLatinoTime
(Intercept) 68.762***
2.398
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish -0.462
3.433
p = 0.893
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID
Time with Non-Latinos

SurveyNonLatinoTime
(Intercept) 38.000***
2.543
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish 0.100
3.641
p = 0.978
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID
Closeness with Latinos

SurveyLatinoSelf
(Intercept) 5.552***
0.132
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish 0.258
0.189
p = 0.174
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID
Closeness with Non-Latinos

SurveyNonLatinoSelf
(Intercept) 4.171***
0.148
p = <0.001
GroupSpanish 0.339
0.211
p = 0.111
Num.Obs. 205
Std.Errors IID

Combined Coefficient Plot

Heterogeneity Analysis

Prosociality Index

Kinship Index

Prostate Index

Regressions

## NOTE: 5 observations removed because of NA values (RHS: 5).
## NOTE: 5 observations removed because of NA values (RHS: 5).
## NOTE: 5 observations removed because of NA values (RHS: 5).
ProsocialityIndex KinshipIndex ProstateIndex
(Intercept) -0.225 -0.056 -0.130
0.252 0.122 0.277
p = 0.373 p = 0.643 p = 0.640
GroupSpanish 0.511 0.201 0.452
0.405 0.195 0.445
p = 0.209 p = 0.304 p = 0.311
DemoGenerationImmigrant 0.081 0.002 0.093
0.127 0.061 0.140
p = 0.523 p = 0.977 p = 0.508
GroupSpanish × DemoGenerationImmigrant -0.195 -0.053 -0.286
0.207 0.100 0.227
p = 0.346 p = 0.597 p = 0.209
Num.Obs. 200 200 200
Std.Errors IID IID IID

Robustness Checks

Fluency

Density

ECDF

Means

Conservative

Robustness check: remove 12 least “Spanish” people from the English group (worried about selection)

ProsocialityIndex KinshipIndex PCA1 PCA2
(Intercept) 0.061 2.115*** -0.292 -0.221
0.058 0.026 0.252 0.214
p = 0.295 p = <0.001 p = 0.249 p = 0.303
GroupSpanish 0.005 0.050 -0.013 -0.567*
0.081 0.036 0.355 0.301
p = 0.951 p = 0.176 p = 0.970 p = 0.061
Num.Obs. 197 198 198 198
Std.Errors IID IID IID IID